The Breakfast Table

Preparing for a Toxic Week

Evan–

What’s puzzling me right now is where to lay the blame. Is it simply having lived through too many of these by now? Or did Bill Clinton’s derelictions deliver the coup de grâce? Or has political discourse in this country grown so debased that even a political junkie like me can’t take it anymore?

For whatever reason, the romance of politics seems forever lost. I can’t summon up the emotion, and I can barely summon up the memory of the emotion. I used to love this stuff.

It hit me yesterday, during the same morning shows you were evidently watching. Sitting through William Bennett’s smug, sanctimonious pontifications on Meet the Press, I felt some of the same impatient anger I would have felt in leap years past, but I also felt this immense … fatigue. The intellectual dishonesty–the shameless bullshit–that passes for high-minded debate these days is enough to make a grown-up gag. On both sides of the aisle, possibly equally. (Having made that pass at fairness and objectivity, I have to admit I really do think the Republicans have been worse, at least since the Gingrich revolution. But neither side has much to be proud of. Clinton’s ‘96 campaign was scandalous less for its fund-raising than for being 100 percent content-free.)

In fact, what also occurred to me while watching those talking heads yabber away, what seeped through the waves of nausea, is how thoroughly artificial the practice of politics has become. It has rules as rigid and as arbitrary as football. Some things are required to be said even though nobody takes them seriously, and some things aren’t said even though everybody knows them to be true.

Part of McCain’s appeal–maybe even the preponderant part–was simply that he was occasionally willing to break those rules. Much of the substance of what he had to say (outside of his courageous stand on campaign-finance reform) was pretty unpalatable, but still, it was impossible not to enjoy his willingness to break the rules, to pull back the curtains and expose the stage machinery, to wink at the twaddle.

I’m reminded of a California Republican senatorial candidate a few years ago named Bruce Hershensohn. He was awful in almost every respect, but on election night, he did something genuinely admirable. A reporter asked him if he was going to win, and he said (this is a paraphrase), “How the hell do I know? The polls have already closed, so there’s no point in saying something optimistic to rally the troops. I don’t have a clue what the outcome’s going to be. I’ll find out when everybody else does.” The reporter didn’t know what had hit her. Honesty on election night! It was unprecedented!

We’re in agreement about Cheney, by the way. Either he dismisses the significance of his voting record, or he defends it by saying he needed to be fiscally responsible. I have to wonder: How would it have busted the budget to vote to free Mandela? To ban cop-killer bullets? And how could someone so proud of his fiscal rectitude have joined all those other supply-siders in bankrupting the country?

Honestly, Evan, scout’s honor, I’ll try to be less dyspeptic from now on. Maybe I just had to get yesterday’s poison out of my system. The problem is, this promises to be a toxic week.

Best,
Erik